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The Id and The Odyssey; Episode 15

An Old Lady's Warmth

Rich quickly
found a road off the highway that wound east.

He peddled past
an abandoned house with a garage. He turned back and peddled inside
the garage and settled in for lunch; a can of corned beef, a small
bag of chips, a package of Twinkies, and a bottle of Royal Crown
Cola. After eating he was too nauseated to move. He sat on the gravel
floor of the garage leaning against the wall and nodded asleep for a
while. He awoke, startled at first not knowing where he was. The
nausea had passed during the nap.

He collected his
wits and pushed out into the soft rain and followed a hand drawn map.
It led down roads like Mount Pleasant Road, Irish Settlement Road,
and others until locating Route 221.

He peddled into a
berg named Marathon. It was there Rich mustered the courage to jump
into the back of a delivery truck with his bike. It had boxes of
canned goods and was nearly empty.

After a thirty
minute ride through curves, stops, up hills, and down hills the truck
slowed and pulled off the road onto a paved parking lot. Rich jumped
out while it had not yet come to a complete halt. He had little idea
where he was. He peddled up to the driver as if he just arrived and
ask him where they were.

“McDonough,”
the driver said curtly. He got out of the cab and walked to back of
the truck to deliver the canned goods to a small grocery where he had
stopped.

McDonough was no
more than a few houses tucked between the creases of some hills. The
beauty of the surrounding hills was not enough to overcome the
miserable weather.

Rich had perhaps
two hours of daylight remaining and needed desperately to remove his
rain soaked clothing and warm myself. He considered a motel room, but
it looked as if this town had none.

He walked inside
the grocery. An older thin lady with gray hair gathered in a bun on
top of her head and wearing glasses sat behind the counter.

She smiled
politely and stood. “Can I help you?”

“Do you know of
a park with a shelter house?” Rich asked expectantly.

“Sure,” she
said.

Rich smiled,
“Where?”

She drew a map on
the piece of paper and explained it to him. “Once you turn on this
road, in about mile you’ll see a big rock on you left. There’s a
road there. Take that road until it dead ends, then go to your right.
In about a hundred yards there’s a road to the right. That’s
where you’ll find a shelter house.”

“Thanks,”
Rich said and folded the paper and tucked it inside his field jacket.

Rich picked up a
few items and brought them to the counter. “Can I have a half pound
of bacon?”

She walked behind
the meat counter, tore some wrapping paper from a roll, and laid it
on a meat scales. She piled on a half pound of bacon, wrapped it, and
tied it with string. “What else for you?” She said.

“Is it too much
to ask if I could buy just two eggs?” I said.

“How bout you
buy a half a dozen. Fix what you want now and boil the rest. They’ll
keep,” she said.

“That’s a
good idea!” Rich smiled. “Thank you, Ma’am.”

She gave him six
eggs in a sack. “Be careful with these.”

Rich paid the
lady.

As he was about
to nudge the door open she said, “Just north of the shelter house
is a road, keep going east until it dead ends and go north. You’ll
come a little town called Preston, Route 10 goes through there.”

“Thanks you,
Ma'am,” Rich said. “You've been kind and helpful.”

She smiled shyly
and sat on her stool behind the counter.

He steered east
out of McDonough, as the old lady told him, peddling desperately. He
found the road marked by a rock. It was a gravel road softened by the
rain. Peddling was arduous.

He located the
shelter house and quickly gathered fallen branches and twigs from the
surrounding woods that had not been soaked by the rain. He was
shivering almost uncontrollably. A fire was started that was slow at
first, but eventually roared. His sleeping bag was damp in a couple
of spots and he hung it along with soaked clothing on a rope attached
between two support poles. He boiled three eggs and a potato and had
them for supper along with two cups of tea.

As darkness was
well along he was entertained by the dancing fire and cracks of
embers. He listened to the radio for the next day’s weather
forecast. He placed nearly all his gear on a picnic bench as a bed
and crawled into a warm sleeping bag. Rich slept well, but coaxed
himself from the sleeping bag several times during the night to keep
the fire going.

At one point
during the night he sat with the sleeping bag draped over his
shoulders and gazed into the flames. His eyes were heavy but the mind
was restless, speeding and bouncing from one thought to another,
never staying in one place long enough to explore or absorb.

He wondered to
what extent his sisters might be effected. They were eight and ten
years old than him; they would know why he chose this path. He was
certain it was something they contemplated and in their own way and
time they did the same.

“Our home was
not one of refuge and comfort,” he thought.” “My younger sister
found it by crating a new family and nice home and prospered. My
older sister found a husband like her father only worse and sunk into
an abyss of despair that she could not possibly climb out. She wanted
desperately for me to escape the fate she suffered during her teenage
years. Dad never reasoned anything out with us. He pontificated for a
while and then lost his temper. Mom also had nothing more to say
than, just do it because I say so.”

“When both of
my sisters announced they were pregnant before they were married, Mom
was angry at first, then cried for a day or two, and then felt
shamed. She saw decency as merely hiding what was indecent. It was
not the purity of the inner person, but rather the appearance which
was of the most value.”

Rich recalled the
time he wrote all his impure thoughts on the outside wall of a
school. His mother was notified. They spent an hour in the principals
office and she lectured him on the way home. Her shame was great.
Rich wanted to take it away. Not for myself, because what he was, was
scrawled on the wall. He had no problem with that. He got the
attention he wanted. What was written on the wall was a dark dirty
secret of what went on inside Rich’s home - vulgar and lewd
language. Everybody knew it. He now publicized it. By this time in
his Dad’s life he had given up and thus displayed little emotion or
feelings either for his daughters’ fornication or Rich’s deviant
and shocking behavior. And it was certainly leading to a much worse
course than Rich’s sisters.

In the morning he
was awakened by the sound of loons. He laid on his side and stared
into the glowing embers. He thought, “That lady's heart was as warm
as the fire that warmed me.”

Rich pulled the
atlas from the gear. Using the old lady’s directions he plotted a
series of small highway routes for the next day that would lead him
to the Schenectady area.

From Kenton Lewis: You Must Read This First To Know What The Heck Goes On Here

This site contains mostly fiction. Currently a novel is posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday entitled Beyond Beyond. It is broken down into short episodes between two and four pages each. Thus, if you enter on anything other than episode 1, it would be good the scroll down to find previous episodes.

The archives are full of short stories. Some short stories are very short, just one posting. Others are broken down into episodes also.

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This Is He

Taken shortly after my beheading. I refused to give up coffee. "Not from my cold dead hands!"